


Crescent Palmed Girl

by Toryb



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Christmas Setting but not super relevant to the plot, F/M, Gladys is the worst mom ever TM, Hurt/Comfort, Letters from Jughead Jones, Mentions of Attempted Suicide, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, ex: if you have a scar it shows up in the same place on your soulmate, more just a reason for betty to behead gingerbread men, psychiatric hospital
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 07:10:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12835956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toryb/pseuds/Toryb
Summary: Betty Cooper is a nurse at a Psychiatric Hospital. Jughead Jones is one of her patients. He disappears without a word and she ends up with the journal he's been writing to his soulmate.





	Crescent Palmed Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Hugs thanks to tumblr user @bughead-is-riverdale for quickly beta-ing this for me. I get the feeling this won't be the last thing we work on together ;)
> 
> I was feeling really down in the dumps today and Dear Angel was my "I'm sad I need cathartic release" fic and since that's done I just guess I'll be pumping out very angsty hurt/comfort oneshots whenever I feel down!
> 
> Side note: Jellybean is referred to as Cynthia because Gladys and FP are not together when she is born and thus I imagine she would not be named Forsythia. Made it Cynthia so it was still somewhat easy to pickup on who I was referring to!

When Betty Cooper was just eight years old she came face to face with the very real possibility that she was among the 1% of the population that did not have a soulmate. The “unmarked” as they were so artfully called. She watched as little girls excitedly lifted their skirts when the little boys fell on the playground to see if they now had a matching purple bruises. Many of her classmates were already matched by the time third grade rolled around. No matter how many times she asked her mother or father, they never had any answers as to why she was destined to be alone. There were a lot of nights curled up in her frilly pink sheets, sobbing into her plush kitten’s stomach as she silently cursed the cruel unforgiving universe.

Determined to prove destiny wrong, at the age of thirteen she began cataloging every bruise, every scrape, every mark on her body at the end of the night. She would compare this to the night before to see if anything had changed. On the eve of her fourteenth birthday, Betty finally won. Tracing what she could only suspect as a cigarette burn, hidden by the sleeve of her cardigan, the victory felt bittersweet. Whoever they were, wherever they were: her soulmate was hurting.

As the years went on, her body became littered in scars. Some were the familiar circles of burnt flesh, but others were much more sinister in nature. Jagged cuts along her forearms, bruises on her inner thighs: painstakingly she marked them all down, fighting back the tears that splattered the old spiral bound parchment. Betty had no way to give him comfort of love. The only thing she had for him in return were the crescent imprints in her palms.

Now, twenty-six years old and an asylum nurse, she saw many scars on many different people. They were not always so obvious as the one’s she hid behind her cardigans and scrubs. For many people, their scars had been sewn by disease of the mind, leaving deep lacerations in happy memories, rotting them until even a birthday party could be a tragic event. People were very cruel. She learned that young. It was just more obvious these days.

Betty’s favorite patient was Forsythe Pendleton “Jughead” Jones the third. He was eighteen, brought in by his mother after a his second botched suicide attempt: a hanging where the rope had snapped and the neighbors found him bleeding and unconscious under the tree. She had been fortunate enough not to meet the woman named Gladys Jones. From the bits of information she had managed to pull from Jughead, his mother was not the kind of woman one would love or respect, even her own children.

He wrote extensively in a leather bound journal she’d purchased for him. A congratulations on his fifth week at the clinic. His humor always kept her on her toes, but for once, he seemed genuine in his thanks. There wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t see him with his nose either buried in his book or one of the many he checked out from the library.

Over the year they were together, she had never seen a someone progress so quickly. The petrified, mirthless boy who walked in was not the same as who he was only months later. Pride, happiness, and always lingering on the ends was sadness. Sadness, resignation, that one day he would leave her and the hum drum life she lead before would resurface. All the color would fade away, just like his memory of the blonde nurse who brought him his medicine and sat outside for hours watching the birds with him when he couldn’t (or simply wouldn’t) speak and made sure that they would play Tarantino at least once a month in the common room so he could slink from his small boxed in cage. 

One year. A single year he had stayed with them before disappearing without a goodbye. Jughead left nothing in his room, not a single thing she could remember him by. Her heart ached and the tears came with reckless abandon. He left without knowing her deepest secret: that one year ago, when she had received his chart, she had frozen in her path. Every mark on his body was mirrored on her own, right down to the crescent marks on his palms. She supposed now it was a secret she would take to the grave.

Mercifully, the doctor cut her shift short. Betty wasn’t much use when she was a wallowing mess. She stumbled home that evening, not noticing the box sitting on her front porch until she nearly stumbled over it. The cardboard glew in the flickering red and white Christmas lights decorating her door. The mailman had not treated her parcel well. It had been left outside to fare the New York December snow on its own.

There was no return address that she could see, and for a moment Betty feared there might be a bomb inside. Quickly categorizing that thought as “intrusive reasons I should not watch Forensic Files alone before bed anymore”, she shuffled inside. The tree fixed in the center of her small living room did nothing to bring happiness to her tonight. Even the mantle ornament “J-O-Y” felt like a cruel insult. Only melancholy filled her heart.

Betty reached for the scissors -pink and polka dotted- and cut the tape of the box. Inside were a few Christmas baubles: a ceramic silver dove hung from a string, a few bits of golden tinsel, a copy of the movie Die Hard (the words “Best Christmas Movie Ever” written hastily on a yellow sticky note. For a few moments, she could not understand who would send her such a box of oddities for the holidays, until she reached the bottom and pulled out the familiar worn brown leather. Etched in the corner from a paperclip she’d given him after weeks of begging were the initials “J.J.”

Her heart soared and the tears fell once again. Jughead had not vanished without a trace like she feared, without so much as a goodbye while the forbidden words of ‘I love you’ still danced on her lips. She searched the box again for any explanation, any note she’d missed, but there was nothing. This journal had been his solitude. Even her curious eyes were never allowed so much as a glance at his work. When she’d ask, he has simply smiled and replied with a cryptic, “Maybe one day.”

Turning open to the first page, glass of wine in hand and a decapitated gingerbread cookie by her side, Betty decided “one day” meant “today”.

\-----------------

Dear Crescent Palmed Girl,

My mother said that when I was born, the doctors opened my palms and were surprised to find two deep sets of nail marks along my palms. They explained to her it was likely from my soulmate: older than me by at least a few years. When I asked her at five, that was the same response I got, only it was accompanied by the familiar burn of a cigarette to my arm.

On my first day at the asylum (though I hear no they prefer to be called ‘Psychiatric Clinics’), my life came full circle as I explained to them the origin of my crescent palms. I still don’t think they believed me and they marked it down as a potential sign to watch. Why they did I don’t think I’ll ever understand. I was very forthcoming with all my other self inflicted wounds.

Growing up, I was told almost every day that my soulmate was cursed to have someone like me. My mother ruled my world with an iron fist and a lit cigarette, always held at the ready for when I disobeyed, which in her eyes was often. I tried to push you far from my mind, praying you would move on, find someone more well suited to you than I was. I would fade from your world without a hello and the wounds you suffered because of me would fade from your skin.

On my eighteenth birthday, my mom told me to kill myself. She was busy at school with my sister, helping decorate the classroom for the middle school’s fall production of  _ It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown _ . When she spoke, it was so casually, as if the words coming from her mouth were well thought out and calculated. I think they were.

_ When I get home, I hope you’ve done us all a favor and killed yourself. _

I was of no use to her now. My dad’s child support had dried up when I’d been given the pin of “legal adult”. There was no reason to keep a burden like me around. She was furious when she came home and found me, hunkered over the toilet while the pills I’d tried to swallow came rushing out of me.

_ You can’t do anything right, Forsythe. Just like your father. _

For all the faults he supposedly had, my mother never told me anything about him. I was five years old when he’d been booted from our home, even though Gladys Jones was still pregnant at the time. I knew he would stumble home some nights, drunk and confused, but he never hurt me like my mother did. He was gentle. Even his alcoholic fury was more focused on the mailbox than his family.

_ Lazy _

_ Incompetent _

_ Stupid _

_ Worthless _

Like tattoos of the brain her words are forever imprinted in me. 

There’s a nurse here, Betty Cooper, who always smiles. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone smile that genuine before. Even my teachers gave me fake grins as they counted down the days until I would no longer be a burden to then. My mother told them I was trouble, and they believed her without fail.

Betty Cooper is kind. I don’t think even in my vast vocabulary I know a better words than that for her. Kind. It emcompasses her very being. She bought this journal for me, without even asking what I would put in it. It took me awhile to figure that out for myself, but I decided I wanted to write to you.

You don’t know me, and I doubt you ever will. The day I’m released I’ll find the nearest bridge and finish the games I started playing awhile ago. But I think inside me is a hidden romantic, who hopes one day you’ll find this and know that I inexplicably and always loved you.

Sincerely,

JJ

\----------------

His childhood was a story Betty knew well. Group therapy had been a slow going process with Jughead, so she had been tasked to aid in his slow healing.

“Just tell them it’s deep seeded Mommy issues,” he had remarked, pointing to her pad and paper.”

Even at his most morose he could make her laugh. They laughed a lot together, and for fleeting moments she felt connection: one they both desperately craved. She revealed her own family struggles. An overbearing mother, a doormat father, a sister who had run off and gotten married at seventeen to their arch nemesis the Blossoms.

“I don’t understand all this maple syrup politics,” he laughed, “I think the drugs I grew up with on the Southside actually make a lot more sense. At least I have concrete proof that stuff has cocaine in it.”

It was foolish, how much she relied on the contents of his journal for closure. Blindly and faithfully she hoped at the end would be a sketched out map of his location, so she could run to him and say what she had always wanted to. Many of the entries were mundane, or pieces of unused poetry he tried his best scribbled out with drying blue ink. Betty hadn’t played detective since she was a child. But the trail of Jughead Jones would go cold only when her heart stopped beating.

\--------------

Dear Crescent Palmed Girl,

Maybe I shouldn’t talk about Betty Cooper to you so much, but I hope it hurts a little less knowing I want your happiness. And me, far far away, is what will bring it.

I cling to her like a lifeline: my pretty blonde haired nurse with eyes so green I feel like I’m drowning in them. Something about me, she gets. I’ve never felt such genuine understanding before. I’ve always walked to the beat of my own drum, but she walks right along beside me, laughing at my not so clever jokes and spoiling me with home baked cookies she’s smuggled in from the outside. They never have a nail file to break me out of here, but the sweats are always welcomed.

Betty tells me she doesn’t have a soul mate, which is tragic for the world. Someone like her deserves a someone who will love her unconditionally, with every bit of life they have in their body. 

I often think placing people on high pedestals can lead to disappointment. Expectations of another person’s attitude can only lead to unhappiness. A mother is supposed to love you: false. A father is supposed to protect you: false. A nurse is supposed to care for you:...to be determined.

The world seems a little brighter standing beside Betty Cooper. It’s like she is the sun, carrying along a bag of happiness that she graces us mere mortals with. Were I an ancient Greecian I might suspect of being a modern day Apollo. As a 21st century man, I’ll settle for the word angel. I doubt even that is truly enough praise to sing, but anymore might cross the territory from lonely man desperate for affection to lonely man desperate for affection  _ and  _ wielding a menacing axe.

If I trusted myself with the obtainable, one might say I was developing a crush on her.

Sincerely,

JJ

\-----------------------

Betty let out a sob so loud her feline friend previously curled up on the couch gave a startled jump. They were the nicest words she had ever heard, let alone from a man. Had he really been so blind to her own blossoming affections? From the very beginning she knew she loved him. Her hidden torch, tucked away so the highers up would not grow suspicious of her time spent with the Jones boy and pull her off of duty.

Even the gingerbread could not ease the dull ache in her chest: a gaping hole that her heart had once filled. His pain made her weep. His hatred of himself was torture. How could he not see the man she did: so eager for love she would have easily plucked the moon from the sky had Jughead asked her to.

She continued to turn the pages, despite the growing agony. From the book fell a folded letter. It was unlike Jughead to not keep his words confound to a single binding.  Curious, Betty picked it up and began to unfurl.

\----------------------

Forsythe:

If I had even the fainted bit of hope you might care, I would ask if you knew how difficult life has been for your sister and I since your failed grab at attention. I’m not sure what you were thinking: using a rope you knew had been in the garage since your father left. You always were stupid, but I thought for once even you would know better.

All the neighbors are spreading rumors about what’s happened. They ask me how my crazy son is doing, and Cynthia is constantly mocked at school for what you’ve done. Or rather, what you failed to do.

Not only are you a social burden on your family now, you are financial. If you hadn’t been found and it was expected of me to pay for some sort of your treatment, I would have woken you up and given you the bleach from the cupboard to drink instead. Because you acted so carelessly, I’m now having to crunch numbers just to make ends meet while I shell out hundreds for them to “fix” your little problem. 

I’m giving you until the year is up before I stop the payments. That’s enough time for you to work up a better plan and fool the nurses and doctors into letting you go. I’d beg that you don’t disappointed me again, but knowing your track record you are never one to make me proud or happy.

Gladys Jones

\-----------------------------

The anger Betty felt was white hot. It started in her toes, spreading up through her veins like the warmth of hot chocolate. Only this did not leave her ready for a cosy cuddle by the fire. Instead she felt sick to her stomach. Sure, her own mother had viewed her actions as a failure constantly, but never to this degree. Even Alice Cooper would find faults in parenting this harsh.

In the pages that followed, Jughead never made note to the letter he had been sent, only left it tucked between his words as a constantly reminder. Judging by just how deep the fold lines were, he reread his mother's words often. For not the first time that night, Betty broke into tears.

\--------------------------

Dear Crescent Palmed Girl,

Would you believe me if I said I think of you every day? How every day I imagine what you're touch would feel like? How I know it could heal every ache and break and bruise of my skin and make me into a whole man? How if I could have anything in the world, it would be a single day to spent with you?

Are you tall or short? What color is your hair? 

No wait, what color are your eyes?

I have so many questions I’ll never be able to ask you. But I think what I regret most is that I’ll never be able to hold you. I know you’re hurting too, in an agony, wrapped up in your own fears and held together by a single thread of hope. I wish every day that I could walk with you along that tight rope, bringing you away from the cliff's edge and away from the precipice of disaster.

You deserve so much more than me: a damaged loner from the wrong side of the tracks who’s locked away in a tower where the dragons keeping me inside are my own personal demons, clawing away at the edge of my mind. I’m sure soon they’ll widdle me down until there’s nothing less but my lifeless exoskeleton in my place. No need for you to be a valiant white knight, riding in on your shining steed only to find that I’ve been long gone. I’ve been gone since birth, counting down the days until I can go back to the clouds where I felt nothingness and peace.

I wonder if these words will be hard to read when you don’t know me. They’re hard to write. It feels like a long, continuous goodbye. Perhaps maybe that’s what it is. A goodbye to you, a woman who knows little about me but the scars I’ve peppered on your perfect skin, but with every fiber of my being I love. In another world, in another life, in another reality I hope people like us are holding each other tightly and giving each other the kisses I can never share with you.

In another universe, you and I are good for each other.

Sincerely,

JJ

\--------------------------

Betty studied his words carefully, but every letter after felt like another goodbye. How different would the world be if she had told him instead of covering up her world with a lie? Would the knowledge of having his soulmate so close have brought him farther from the edge, or kept him barrelling towards it? She prayed that Jughead Jones was alive, but as the words continued on, even that burning fire of hope was slowly dying.

He wrote out his plans. A bridge the day he left the hospital. No goodbye to anyone, not even his mother or sister. He would go missing without a trace. The doctors, and Betty, would never believe see no reason to keep him when he’d already become the model patient. She wanted to desperately to be fooled by his lies that she had cost him his life.

Still she continued on, pushing through the pages until they were nothing but a blur in her mind. When she flipped the paper over, the next page was blank.

And the next.

And the next.

His story had ended. No dramatic words, no tearful goodbye, just as he had hoped. Her body shook with sobs. Anger, hurt, sadness: they all filled her heart. This was not how a fairytale book closed.

Tear drops hit the parchment, and Betty watched with wide eyed surprise as a black ink bled through. Her heart thundered in her chest and the embers of hope resurfaced. She took another breath and turned the page.

\------------

Dear Betty Cooper,

I think it’s cute sometimes how well you think you can lie. If the twitch of your nose of the lift of your head wasn’t a big enough tell, the marks on your hands were. My Crescent Palmed Girl. I spent a long time wondering why you would hide something like that from me. For weeks I figured my mother was right. Whoever my soulmate was, she was mortified to call herself mind.

But the more I watched you, the more I started to learn. You fought for me in my darkest moments, made me feel painfully alive when it was the last thing I thought I wanted. Every day with you were the first in a long while that when I woke up, I was thankful to feel my heart beating again.

I don’t want my story to end on a bridge anymore. That’s where I want it to begin.

Come find me Betty Cooper. 

I love you,

JJ

\---------------

Betty ran. She ran until her feet hurt, her legs ached, her throat screamed. She ran until the world was nothing but a snowy white Christmas blur and the children’s delighted screams became nothing but echoes in the back of her mind.

Forward. 

Forward.

He was still there, waiting for her on the bridge behind the clinic, the bridge they had walked across so many times together when his legs got too restless for the hospital. His breath curled in the winter chill and his bright blue eyes were ever forward, watching as the tired birds settled in for the night. When he heard the crunch of the leaves, Jughead turned to face her and a smile fell onto his lips.

Betty didn’t wait for his arms to open. She threw herself forward: the last of the distance she needed to close for her happiness. Their lips melted together, helping to ease the shivering cold of December.

“I love you too Jughead Jones. I will always find you.”

**Author's Note:**

> as always, find me on tumblr @tory-b


End file.
